A place called MAD

MADRID, Spain – When the airline tags your luggage to send it on to your final destination (you change planes at Charles de Gaulle, Roissy, airport in Paris), what does the tag say? It blares out in big capital letters: MAD.

"Mad" is truly the world which best described Spain’s fantastic baroque-cum-skyscraper seat of royal pomp and plebeian carousing, gastronomy and revelry. But it is delightful form of madness – based not on fury or angst but on the pursuit of a happy way of life, good food, beautiful women – and the exuberant struggle to restore Spain, not to imperial glory, but to its proper place in the esteem of the rest of mankind.

Yet, a caveat. Beware when you step off your aircraft at the Madrid Barajas airport. On occasion, friends have told me, a lady would reach into her purse and find somebody else’s hand in there before hers.

Another friend spotted his bags calmly being wheeled out the exit by a well-dressed young man. He shouted and the cart-pushing slick thief fled.

It’s quite easy to lose your stuff in an unguarded moment. Passengers pick their suitcases and bags off the carousel, then wheel them out or carry them out, past courteous and friendly customs personnel. Nobody when I arrived challenged anyone about luggage tags, or i.d.’s for baggage. Everybody took his stuff and sauntered out into the bracing 12-degree Centigrade chill.

Yes, a reminder: Come dressed warmly if you’re planning to arrive in this sparkling capital. Autumn is in the air, and it sometimes rains. Yesterday, however, was glorious and sunny.

Over the years, I’ve discovered, one falls in love with Madrid again and again. I’m tempted to invoke the title of that Hollywood-flick, Forget Paris (most resentful American tourists, miffed with Jacques Chirac and the hostility of French policy towards their being stuck in Iraq, are shunning Paris, and going to Madrid (their coalition of the willing "ally") and London instead. They’ve junked champagne and those wonderful Chateau Lafitte’s and Margaux for Rioja wines – and the French are feeling a bit of the pinch. But nobody can forget Paris. It still scintillazes, with the Eiffel Tower even blinking like a gemstone with its new winking, dancing lights.

On the other hand, Madrid – though replete with terrific building fronts, gothic, baroque and rococo palaces and churches – is built on a more human, friendly scale.

"Hurrah for Madrid, my village!" some Madrileños exult. As someone said: "Paris, London, Rome, New York or Buenos Aires are proud of being metropolises and do everything they can to stand out from their rival big cities, Madrid makes no effort to do so. Instead, it vaunts its jovial, small-town spirit. It wants to be loved as the "village of good times" – and it is! Sing it out in exclamation point!

A Manileño immediately feels right at home here. The traffic. The pollution. The spontaneity of friendliness of the 3.2 million Madrileños.

As in Metro Manila, many of the people here were born somewhere else. The writer Ramon Gomez de la Serna is quoted in "Madrid Style 2003", edited by Carmen Canut, as exclaiming that Madrid is "a city without metics". The "metics" were the foreigners in ancient Greece from which the rights and benefits of Greek democracy, as practiced by the Athenians, Spartans etc., were excluded.

In Madrid, nobody is excluded. The downside is that this city is now flooded with refugees and illegal immigrants. Boatloads of people, smuggled in from North Africa, busloads from Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the former Soviet states (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) sneak in daily.

If the Spanish authorities don’t watch out, the victory of the reconquista, in which by heroic battles the Spaniards overthrew eight centuries of Arab Muslim colonial rule (hence, the invention of the term Moro, for Moros, and the patron saint of Spain, Santiago Matamoros – St. James, the Moro Killer) will be reversed.

Muslims from Morocco, Tunisia and the Arab lands are today flooding into Spain in such numbers that you can now spot them everywhere. Many of the "refugees" are pregnant women. By quirk of Spanish law, if your child is born in Spain, Mama too becomes eligible for Spanish citizenship. If this keeps on, who knows? Spain like France and Germany may become Muslim-dominated. And don’t forget Islamic London.

For the moment, though, the most dreaded and hated terrorists are the Basque separatists, or ETA. Like the Jemaah Islamiyah in our parts, those Catholic terrorists blow up people and places. What a cruel world this is – yet we’ve got to struggle harder to learn to love one another, so we’ll stop murdering each other.

By the way, this Thursday, delegates from all the major countries, including the USA, Britain and the Philippines (ahem, sneaked that one in!) will be assembling here in a Pledging Session by donor countries for relief, rescue and rehabilitation in Iraq.

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I was happily met at Barajas airport by old friends, our handsome Ambassador Joseph "Lani" Bernardo y Medina and his lovely wife Conchitina who – if you’ll recall – used to be Vice Mayor of Makati.

At last, I had exclaimed, when it was announced that President GMA (who herself speaks fluent Spanish) had designated Lani Bernardo our envoy to Madrid: "An ambassador who speaks Spanish!" Most people don’t realize that Lani’s forebears hail from Ilocos Norte, and he speaks Ilocano, too. (He earned his university degrees in Barcelona).

As everybody in Metro circles know, Conchitina née Sevilla grew up herself in a Spanish-speaking household (her mother Nang Sevilla was for a generation both social arbiter and bilingual journalist). When Conchitina plunged into politics, to almost everyone’s surprise, she handily won the vice mayorship of Makati. When she and her Mayor, Jojo Binay, inevitably clashed (a Beauty and the Beast situation in reverse) Conchitina opted out – quietly quit and decided to shun politics for life.

Both Lani and Conchitina – who lived in Barcelona and Madrid in their early married life – are not merely doing much meaningful work for our country here, but enjoying their experience immensely.

Why – they even taught the genialconcertina man whose music dominates the El Meson de la Tortilla at the Cava de San Miguel (just off the boisterous Plaza Mayor) how to sing all our Filipino songs. So, when he spotted us walking in the other night, the maestro swung into our national anthem, then into Dahil sa Iyo, Sitsiritsit, Paruparong Bukid, Cielito Lindo and so forth.

The other patrons applauded. That fella had a song for every nationality in the room.

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Sorry if this is beginning to sound like a... well, society column. When you’re suffering from jet lag, one treads about essaying profound thoughts with caution. I might end up endorsing the wrong presidential candidate.

I notice that a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey has just given George W. Bush a big approval rating, and that most Filipinos polled want the US to stay in Iraq, not pull out. Just goes to show that, contrary to all that Leftist propaganda and bullshit, and those ersatz demonstrations, Filipinos are, by and large, friendly towards the United States and genuinely like Americans.

I was happy to see our dear friend, Jose "Pepito" Rodriguez at the airport to meet me. Pepe, who spent more than twenty years as a true Manileño (17 of them as chief of EFE for Asia) is back with his old agency Agencia EFE here in Madrid in the Direccion Commercial Gerente de Area. His wife, the famous portrait artist Lulu Coching, is still in Manila, but will rejoin Pepe and their kids here soon. Pepe’s heart is still back in the Philippines and will forever be – but I was glad, for my own selfish reasons, to find him in Madrid. For Pepe Rodriguez has always been the best talking "guidebook" on everything Spanish.

No Filipino can feel a stranger in Madrid, or indeed most of Spain. The spirit of Madre España was bred into our bones for more than three and a half centuries – our names, in truth our souls are still Spanish, despite an overlay of Disneyland, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and Seattle’s Best, and more than a century in Hollywood.

Even the first-time Pinoy visitor realizes with a pang that Madrid is the city of our heart.

We may have, as is said, "lost our Spanish", but even as we speak Tagalog, Taglish, Ilocano and English, our instincts and knee-jerk reactions are truly Iberian. Amor propio, testiness, emotionalism, passion, fury. Our parents and grandparents were schooled in Castilian ways, and every turn, calle, shop here jogs my familial memory. Every kitchen smells like that of Lola’s and those of the maiden aunts who thronged my childhood.

It’s a pity that not enough Filipinos come to Spain. It is our spiritual homeland. Here we will, with a shock of recognition, find ourselves – and each other.